Charles
Murtaugh has recently been assembling a list of best conservative films
and he's been advocating for The Limey. So the wife and I
are watching it and she asks : "How can this be conservative when the hero's
an armed robber who goes around shooting people?" Her hesitancy is
understandable, but I think there are a couple of elements that do indeed
make it conservative (though I'll let Charles speak for himself as to why
he chose it).

The first, and more obvious, reason to consider this a conservative
film is that the basic plot structure is built around the notion that if
you plop a principled man--the limey and ex-con, Wilson (Terrence Stamp)--down
in the midst of unprincipled men--drug-dealing Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda)
and his henchmen--it is the man of principle who is most dangerous because
he will keep moving forward inexorably until his principles are vindicated.
Admittedly, the values that Wilson adheres to may not be right out of the
classic Judeo-Christian playbook, but he does nonetheless have a strict
and uncompromising set of rules that govern his life, among which are the
necessity to wreak vengeance on the men who killed his daughter.
Meanwhile, for Valentine and company, there are no behavioral standards,
no morals to be followed; all is negotiable and nothing else matters but
your own survival. It is a sad commentary on the state of American
culture that the filmmakers felt it necessary to make Wilson so overtly
alien (not just British, which we fawningly associate with higher standards
in all things, but lower-class British so that his accent and vocabulary
make him even more of a fish out of water). When a DEA agent says
to Wilson, "You're not from around here, are you?", he is presumably referring
not just to his national origin but also to how different he is from the
laid-back Californians amongst whom he's now operating. Wilson's
savage morality is sadly just as foreign to us as is his Cockney slang.

The other aspect of the movie that makes it particularly conservative
is the way in which Peter Fonda's character references the character he
played in Easy Rider
(1969). Stamp is clearly supposed to be portraying an older version
of the character he played in Poor
Cow (1967), to the point where director Soderbergh even uses film clips
from that earlier role. But not many of us will ever have seen that
film. Easy Rider, on the other hand, is a touchstone of 60s
culture and a key to understanding the era. Fonda and Dennis Hopper
are counterculture antiheroes, riding around on their motorcycles in search
of America. Along the way they find drugs, hippies, mimes, Jack Nicholson,
cops, etc. And in the famous ending of the film America finally catches
up to them, as a pickup full of rednecks shotguns Fonda and Hopper right
off of their bikes. In many ways the finale drew a line across the
culture, and whether you rooted for the bikers or the truckers defined
which side of the line you were on. As the 1968 election and 1972
re-election of the loathsome but "law-and-order"
Richard Nixon demonstrated to the Left's chagrin, most of us were rooting
for the guys with shotguns.

Since Fonda's character presumably died at the end of Easy Rider,
he's not explicitly playing the same character in The Limey.
But it's easy to imagine that this is what that biker (like so many of
his generation) would have turned into--ammoral, self-absorbed, faux spiritual,
cashing in on both the music of the 60s (he's a record producer) and the
drugs (gone is any pretense that they'll bring enlightenment; they're just
easy money). As Fonda preens around the screen with his fake tan,
his over white teeth, and his vapid young girlfriend; moving between his
ostentatious LA canyon home and his Big Sur bungalow; mouthing inanities
about the meaning of the 60s; any conservative who's worth his salt will
be salivating at the prospect of watching him get whacked again.

So, The Limey may not be conservative in the obvious way that
say It's a Wonderful Life and A
Man for All Seasons are, but there's much here to warm the cockles
of a right-wing whacko's heart. Point taken, Mr. Murtaugh.